In what only a company the size of Google could pull off, on May 31st the giantG will organize, promote, host and broadcast a Global Developer Day in ten cities around the globe.
The fact that they will stream via YouTube is impressive. Many will recall that Google invested in dark fiber. This is one reason why. Google remains the most self contained example of Viral Marketing around, as everything they do is built upon their own assets to market someone else’s assets. In this case they will get the human capital of what should be thousands of developers in the ten cities live, and have hundreds of thousands elsewhere. This is game changing concept and makes one think about the expense that eBay goes to with their ebay Live confab that included a Developer’s Conference component which has sideline benefit to Skype for VoIP Developers.
This also puts pressure on the folks at Apple who have always selectively streamed some parts of their events, but never gone totally open as it appears Google is. From a conference organizers perspective this is the type of activity that used to happen (and still does in part) with O’Reilly, PulverMedia and of course TMC’s VoIP Developer Conference that’s coming up next month in Santa Clara, just a few weeks before the Google event. Streaming and simultaneous Live Aid like collaboration has never been a part of their conferences, but now Google has raised the bar and candidly opened the door to so many more upcoming developers who just cannot afford the airfare not to mention the cost admission to be away for so many days.
It will be interesting to hear from Tim O’Reilly, Rich Tehrani and Jeff Pulver on what this type of move and new global developer event means to the industry overall.